Rothko and Yellowism. Beige Magazine. October 2012

Rothko and Yellowism. Beige Magazine. October 2012

Yesterday, I was reprimanded at a dinner party for hesitating when asked to comment on the attack on the Rothko painting in London’s Tate Modern. My detractors, the people who keep public art alive by purchasing ‘Guernica’ pencil erasers and Jackson Pollock silk scarves, couldn’t understand why I never jumped and wailed about the damage to a modern icon, (their words). They told me it was a ‘sacrilegious’ act (seriously) and the harshest penalties should apply to the yellowist idiot in question.

The emotional outcry surrounding this event has made me think. As a humanist and 150% god-free so my failure to jump into condemning the art Jihadi is no big shakes for me. My dinner guests, however, wanted to burn me at the stake.

Defacement of cultural talismans has gone on forever, but it was only when art was given a spiritual and a monetary value that everything changed. As we know, originally it was the religious colonialists who needed art to spread the word of god to the illiterati. Modernism taught the same grouping to read and, as a result, they no longer tallied art to god but money, under the collective noun of Culture.

The confused mixture of religious reverence and modern art is a kind of a muddy crossover. It has recently been stated that Rothko shared the same ‘Power of God’ as Rembrandt and Michelangelo, yet the damage to the painting has also been viewed as an attack on a cultural authority. (Hang on, where did god and money go?) It’s also been compared with the recent attack on Poussin’s Adoration of the Golden calf, whose subject matter is - you guessed it - the consequences of worshiping false gods. That is, false gods like art, money and, well – gods.

It’s the hyphen between ‘Religious’ and ‘Priceless’ that I have issues with. What is it that springs into our modern minds when we see a Michelangelo? God? Never. We think of them  ‘one-off’s’, as masterpieces - we read them as priceless. We never think of the debasement of the religious by the monetary, if we did we’d still be viewing them in a church. So scribbling on a Rothko is hardly taking a valid stance about Abstract Expressionism meeting Capitalist Realism in a chapel of art.  

The religious absence of individuality was removed by modernism and replaced with the ‘cult of the self’. Here, artists didn’t have a responsibility to tell us what was going on in heaven but in the world of their own heads. We have to take the good with the bad. As a commission, the Rothko’s are gloomy, far too gloomy for a Swanky Manhattan restaurant (but happily, not too gloomy for a place mat retailing at £7.95).

The Rothko myth still persists and keeps the cash registers rolling. I remember being told as an art student that, as soon as the crate for the paintings was opened, the Tate received the news of Rothko’s death. Spooky. Well, he’d been in a depressed state ever since the restaurant refused to hang the paintings. The only thing Rothko was left to do was spit in the eyes of all gods - ‘god the father’ and the ‘cult of the self’ – and the only act of power and defiance against abandonment by the deities was suicide. So, without wasting any time, the Tate unpacked the Rothko’s and built a chapel for them.

But these paintings are known to be about Rothko’s state of mind and are therefore, spiritually void. These are not the components of the artists soul but the insides of his head. Emins bed once represented the same (and was duly ‘iconoclasted’) but Rothko wasn’t around at a time when he could market his depression in the same way that Tracey did with her McFeminism - he had to follow through.

Only post-modernism could have saved our bacon and lead us away from the Saatchiesque and Serotian circus of the late capitalist period. Po-Mo was about mass-reproduction and therefore devaluation. It makes me wonder if we would be as horrified had someone defaced a Warhol Marilyn? They are, after all only screen-prints, no great artists touch needed within mass-production. Warhol’s ethos was all about stealing a popular image and placing it in a gallery setting - revaluing the image while at the same time, pissing on the gallery in which it hung. A huge statement about art and monetary value. Shame it didn’t last long.

Andy was a clown, a gooey mass of money and contradiction who, hypocritically, produced his work in editions. If he wouldn’t have done this, it would have become limitless and therefore, devalued. Unknown to either Warhol or his dealer Leo Castelli, a group of real life artistic terrorists stepped in and managed to see the job through by aiming the attack at the revenue.

Warhol’s Factory, in order to keep the image franchise going, sent the Marilyn screens to Germany so the same limited edition run could be printed, exhibited and sold in Europe without Warhol having to be present. Having taken his eye off the ball, Warhol was too busy selling himself as the artwork back in New York. Adhering to the Post-modernist aesthetic, a guerrilla collective took possession of the screens and began churning out endless Marilyns’ in a whole range of vile, garish colours. They rubber-stamped the back of each with ‘Sunday B. Morning’ after their favorite Velvet underground song, then added another stamp requesting the recipient to sign their own name as the artist. Rumor has it they continued the run until the screens fell apart.

This, my friends, is proper art terrorism.

Yellowism and Rothko. Print article: Beige Magazine